Kenny Lake’s The Specter That Still Haunts: Locating a Revolutionary Class within Contemporary Capitalism-Imperialism first appeared on the website of Revolutionary Initiative and was published as a series in kites #1–4 (2020–2021). This 2024 edition is published by Going Against the Tide, with only minor edits and an added preface from the author. Here is an excerpt from that preface:
Anyone seeking to make revolution must figure out the primary social forces on which revolution in their circumstances must be based and the antagonistic contradictions in society that can propel those social forces into motion. In the communist movement in general, a rather static notion of the proletariat as the industrial working-class has continued to hold considerable sway. While genuine communists understood the revolutionary potential of the peasantry in the oppressed countries and the need to go “lower and deeper” to the more exploited and oppressed sections of the proletariat in the imperialist countries, our theoretical understanding had not advanced much beyond those correct propositions while the workings of capitalism had given rise to radical social transformations and new class configurations.
Locating a revolutionary class within contemporary capitalism-imperialism requires a rupture with dogmatic understandings of the proletariat as a class, and with mechanical conceptions of class in general. The latter fail to deal with the greater fluidity of class under capitalism in comparison with previous modes of production in which class was a more fixed, hereditary position from generation to generation. To make that rupture, Part 1 of The Specter That Still Haunts re-examines the ways that Marx, Engels, and Lenin theorized the forms of motion of capital and the development of the proletariat as a class and pushes back against erroneous conceptions that have supplanted them over the last century. Part 2 deals directly with what has changed under capitalism-imperialism in recent decades and how that has affected class formation on a global scale. Part 3 seeks to make up for a shortcoming in the international communist movement, namely a lack of summation of recent revolutionary experiences. It focuses specifically on how some communist parties managed to make advances in relation to changed conditions and new class configurations and what we might take as universal lessons from those experiences. Part 4 applies the theoretical concepts and analytical insights gained through this work to the contemporary US, with the aim of understanding their strategic implications for making revolution.